Yup, it’s that time again – Fedora Graphics Test Week! Tuesday is, well, my birthday, but far more importantly, it’s Nouveau Test Day. Wednesday is Radeon Test Day. And finally, Thursday is Intel (graphics) Test Day. Note that those pages are not complete yet – in particular, they still point to the images from the last Test Week. Don’t download those. There’s no point any more. I’ll be updating those pages tomorrow.

If you’ve never taken part in one before, Graphics Test Week is a set of Fedora Test Days where we test out the three major free graphics drivers for the three major graphics card manufacturers. Obviously, working graphics are important to almost all Linux users, so these test days are of interest to just about everyone. They are Fedora events and the test images are Fedora images, but since Fedora has a strong emphasis on working upstream, any fixes resulting from the event will go upstream straight away, and benefit all distributions – so even if you don’t run Fedora, it’s a good idea to come along and help contribute testing.

Testing is very easy and can be done entirely from a live image – there’s no need to install Fedora pre-release onto your system. You can help with testing in only a few minutes, plus the time it takes to download a live image. All the information you need to test is present on each Test Day wiki page, and there will also be QA group members and Fedora graphics developers in the IRC channel – #fedora-test-day on Freenode – all day long to help you out. If you don’t know how to use IRC, you can use WebIRC.

Even if you can’t make the exact date for your graphics hardware, it’s no problem – you can still carry out the testing and provide the results on the Wiki page. All you’ll miss out on is the IRC chat. Do please wait until the updated images are made available tomorrow, though.

This release’s Graphics Test Week is especially important as one of the things we’ll be testing is compatibility with GNOME 3’s GNOME Shell interface, one of the major new features of Fedora 15. It’s very important to the GNOME and graphics developers to get a good picture of the compatibility of various graphics cards with GNOME Shell. This makes it even more important than usual to get a good broad base of hardware for testing, so if you can spare any time at all in the coming week, please do help out with the Test Week! Thanks very much.